


echoes in the endless night

by zhelaniye



Category: Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor (Video Games)
Genre: M/M, Masturbation, Minor Injuries, brief appearance of very gay torvin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-29
Updated: 2020-11-29
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:20:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,279
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27776743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zhelaniye/pseuds/zhelaniye
Summary: Somewhere inside the caves of the cursed land of Mordor, in the depths of a hailstorm, Talion and Celebrimbor find something in one another that neither of them could imagine they still could have.
Relationships: Celebrimbor | Telperinquar/Talion (Shadow of Mordor)
Comments: 5
Kudos: 35





	echoes in the endless night

There is something to be said about being stuck inside a damp cave, in the darkest pit in Mordor, surrounded only by the rotting remains of a pack of ghûls and a campfire that valiantly struggles to stay alight, and it is that it’s an absolutely miserable place. 

It is only now as he tries to scrape the drying mud from his boots to stop it from completely permeating the already ruined leather with one of the hunting knives Torvin left him that Talion thinks to curse himself for refusing Lithariel’s invitation to stay in the men’s camp. It seems almost pitiful that the promise of a warm and soft bed, away from the unforgiving chill that sinks into his bones and makes his joints ache, should be as alluring now as he was before... _before_. 

But while the invitation had been no doubt heartfelt, he had seen the way her men look at him, the way men in general do. They wrinkle their nose sometimes, as if he carried the stench of uruk-hai blood in his very essence, and they could smell the death that marks him. 

Most of them are friendly, their admiration bordering dangerously on veneration, plain in the way world-weary, battle-scarred men look at him with wide-eyed amazement and fear. 

“Ranger” is the only thing they call him, and he can never tell whether it is supposed to show respect and acknowledgement or dread. 

He is not one of them. He cannot be one of them. Not anymore. 

So he sits in his damp cave - now free of the wretched ghûls after tearing through them by brute force, damning himself for foolishly letting his guard down and not realizing he was stepping in one of their scattered nests, with how desperate he was from cover from the unforgiving wrath of the elements - and he clumsily tries to skin the thin rabbit he’d hunted down. 

He wonders when he lost the ability to feel the touch of Ioreth’s hands, prying the prey away from his grasp, gently berating him for ruining their dinner. 

“Good thing you’re a fighter, not a hunter,” she used to laugh against his lips as he kissed her. 

Torvin had said much of the same thing before they had run with their swords drawn and their hearts racing into the cave of the white graug. He’d laughed at him, mockingly and friendly at the same time, rowdy and strangely comforting, much like everything else about that dwarf, and tossed him the blunt knife he now holds. 

“If you do not leave enough meat on that leg for the both of us, we will cook yours, Cap’n” he said, but the threat had lost some of its weight when he had winked at him. 

Talion sighs in frustration as he tears the last of the skin away from the meat and tosses the knife to his side, acutely feeling the silence around himself like knives against his skin. 

He’d never been a hunting man beyond the strictly necessary for his survival. Daggers and swords had been an extension of his arms since before he could remember, always strapped to his belt, clanging against his short legs as a kid, driving his mother up the walls with worry with how his eyes shone in the training field. But he’d despised bow hunting lessons, he always had, and had ignored them as much as he could get away with while remaining a captain.

Dirhael had soon surpassed his skills as a bowman, to his mother’s delight and Talion’s own amusement, and the pride of the memory is now mingled with an unshakeable grief that threatens to kick the air out of his lungs. 

Celebrimbor guides his hands when he hunts, as well as his aim. The first time Talion had felt a foreign grip on his own bow, and his shoulders and eyes rolling back into place, he’d fired the arrow immediately with the surprise, and had only had the time to hear the elven spirit’s irritated grunt before the uruk whose shoulder his arrow had graced turned towards him with murder in its eyes. 

They’d soon found a balance between Talion’s strength and resilience and Celebrimbor’s steadiness and agility, wandering the barren valley of Udûn, leaving no trace but a trail of black blood dripping from the ranger’s sword. 

And then, after a few days, the elf had started to talk to him. They’d communicated before, when Talion had awoken into his body, only with a deep scar on his neck as a reminder of the man he had been. He had begun to talk by pointing out the medical properties of the athelas that grew wildly on the side of the roads, and had told him about the siege of Barad-dûr and how the númenóreans had made flowers grow in Mordor for the first time in a long, long time. 

Talion had been listening when the elf had cut himself off for a heartbeat in the middle of the tale - almost imperceptible if he had not been paying attention, drinking in the words and cherishing the possibility of conversation - and then the spirit had continued unaffectedly with a tone of slight surprise, as if the mere possibility of his words being heard was shocking. 

And perhaps it was. Talion had not dared to ask how long the spirit had wandered the Nameless Lands alone or how much he remembered of himself before the world had claimed his body and bound his soul to the evil in these lands dwelling in Mordor. 

Interaction with the elf was not always easy. He showed himself most times, his translucent form gaining more and more solidity as they dragged bits of the past out of time into the present, regal and beautiful and almost real enough for Talion to touch if he were to extend his hand. Sometimes he was a voiceless whisper in the back of Talion’s head, like a split, commanding voice of his own consciousness. Sometimes he talked for hours on end, reminiscing, planning, telling stories of ages long gone as if he were living them in that precise moment. Other times he disappeared for long periods of time, despite how sternly Talion tried to beckon him forth.

But they had settled into a comfortable coexistence, the constant companionship an invaluable comfort in this land of acrid smoke and fire and death. 

Talion watches dispassionately as the rabbit cooks itself, inexorably slow, and the scent of fresh meat that he hopes won’t attract the creatures that dwell in the nighttime starts to fill the air. It opens a pit of deep hunger at the bottom of his stomach, that grumbles pitifully.

He thinks back to three nights ago, to a very different cave - warmer and cleaner, with even a pretty decent attempt to a mattress in the shape of grass and torn leaves in the corner. Torvin had been talking buoyantly, telling a story of one of his endless haunts. A great caragor had been stalking a clutter of farms, peripheral to the Gondorian lands, when Torvin had come running out of the blackened woods to strike it down. 

The dwarf was enthusiastic and his broad hands cut through the air as swiftly as his blade when he was engulfed in the telling of one of his grandiose stories. It had been a calm night, almost normal, and as Talion had closed his eyes and let the tension wash away from his body with a sigh of delight, he could almost hear the laughter and the chatter of a tavern around him, he could almost surround himself with the sensation of the living and the world that had been taken from him. 

“You alright in there, Cap’n?” Torvin’s voice had cut swiftly through his thoughts. “You went blank on me for a second there, and I don’t like that none”. 

Talion’s eyes had flown open, and he’d noticed the dwarf sitting closer to him, peering at him inquisitively from underneath his bushy eyebrows. Torvin clicked his tongue, not unkindly. 

“You've seen some shit out there, huh?”

A startled laugh left Talion’s chest at that, surprising them both.

“I guess you could say that,” he said, and it was bitter and defeated but Torvin hadn’t drawn back. 

The dwarf had gotten closer then, a smirk sitting playfully on his lips, and Talion’s skin had prickled in the heat of the cave, his vision had narrowed, focusing on Torvin’s Adam’s apple as he swallowed, and he’d forced himself to drag his eyes upwards, to meet his.

“Well, Ranger, I have a suggestion,” the dwarf had drawled as he set his hand high on Talion’s thigh, drinking in the gasp that the human had emitted. “Why don’t we make the most of this night in a more interesting way?”

And the thing about Torvin was he may have been dirty and loud, but he was alive, fiercely so, as if purposely parading the strength of his beating heart around as he recklessly left his mark on this land where the dead walked and the living came to die. 

And Talion had craved it all, the warmth of the dwarf’s hand on his thigh, the tingling of his breath on his chin as he’d crawled up towards him in search for his mouth, the pleased rumble of Torvin’s chest when their lips had met and his mouth had opened for him immediately, the feeling of the dwarf’s chest hair and the irregularities of his multiple scars under his fingers, desperately scrambling for something to hold onto on Torvin’s broad chest. 

It would have been so easy to lose himself in it, in the inherent and exhilarating sensations of the life radiating off the handsome dwarf in waves, in the way his weight was heavy against his chest, alluring and delightful and _real_. 

But he had not. He’d reluctantly put a hand on Torvin’s chest and pushed him away after a beat - longer than he’d admit. The dwarf had immediately abandoned the exploration of Talion’s hair his fingers had dedicated themselves gleefully to and had sat back, looking at Talion with a combination of lust and apprehension that had done nothing to clear the haze of desire clouding Talion’s sight. 

“I don’t think this is a good idea, Torvin” Talion had said, and the dwarf had tilted his eyebrow questioningly, but he had not pressed the matter. 

“No strings attached, Cap’n,” had offered the dwarf, opening his arms as if daring Talion to take up residence in his lap, and he had been so maddeningly inviting the ranger had felt himself closing the distance slightly even as he shook his head. 

Talion had felt then the almost imperceptible chill sensation on his skin of Celebrimbor’s presence. The elf had not said a word, or moved into his sight, but Talion had felt his attention, his clear eyes drilling into him like a burning needle, pinning him firmly into reality. 

The dwarf had nodded good-naturedly, without losing an inch of his rock-solid cheer. 

“You know where to find me if you change your mind, you know,” he said, and then he added with a lopsided smirk, “you’re not bad looking for a human. Not bad at all.”

Torvin had sat back into his folded furs, taken a good bite out of his dinner and launched himself immediately into another of his wild tales, and that had been it. But Talion had seen the elf appear by his side then, the scarred side of his face turned towards him and his long hair falling over his shoulders, gently moving to an otherworldly breeze. 

There had been an odd expression on his face, and Talion had had to fight the urge to ask him about it in front of the dwarf, who was hardly prepared for his lodging companion to start snapping at the shadows. 

It was only when the small campfire had been reduced to smoldering embers and the incessant snoring of the dwarf had begun to drum against the walls of the cave that Celebrimbor had acknowledged him, or done anything else than stare with his calm and cold inquisitive eyes. 

“Interesting,” he’d muttered, and to Talion’s irritation he’d vanished before he could think to ask any questions. 

So Talion sits now, in another cave, smaller and colder and dirtier, where the only sounds are the slight creaking of the fire, the whispering of the freezing wind outside and his own occasional grunts when he rolls his still and tired shoulders back, tasting their limit.

He’d taken an arrow to the shoulder in the stupidest of ways. He’d been leading a small group of terrified, shaking outcasts to safety, silently stalking across the plains, when the pain had hit him and his vision had blurred with the effects of the poison that was taking to his system astoundingly fast. 

He’d barked orders to the outcasts to run towards Lithariel’s camp and done a quick job of the five uruks that had tracked them, but the pain had remained. 

Celebrimbor sits at his side now, visible in the faint warm light, and observes him. His cold, impenetrable expression is etched on his face as if in marble, but his eyes are curious and his head tilts to one side, observing the human. Talion thinks, not for the first time, that he must have been quite handsome once - before the marking and scarring, before the barely concealed anger and the incessant drive for revenge that burns hotly under his calm demeanor. 

The elf studies his weary movements as he tries to look at his own shoulder and inspect the state of the wound for a minute before huffing. 

“Allow me,” he says, and his commanding tone leaves no room for choice. 

His hand reaches out and Talion feels it against his uncovered skin, not its physicality, but the reality of it. A sort of otherworldly touch, like a memory, that’s more inside his head than outside. But it is enough to send shivers down his spine and, to his immense chagrin, he blushes.

There’s a faint warm aura emanating from Celebrimbor, entering Talion’s body through their single point of contact, and the pained muscles of his back start to loosen up as a sigh of relief leaves his body. 

“What did you do?” the ranger asks, keeping his eyes closed and enjoying the brief respite from his injury, the comforting warmth of the fire and the smell of food for just a moment. 

“Yavanna loved the Eldar when they first walked upon the surface of Arda,” the elf says, “she taught them how to grow things and heal them, and how to heal themselves too. And that knowledge was passed down to me.”

The strange weight of Celebrimbor’s hand is not lifted. Instead, his fingers travel towards the back of Talion’s neck and sink there, merging with the human’s skin without restraint, and Talion can feel the already familiar sensation of the elf’s presence inside his body. 

“What-” he begins to ask, but then Celebrimbor moves his fingers, pushes the presence of them into a sore spot on Talion’s back, and the spark of pain followed by immediate relief shakes through his body and makes a broken moan erupt from his mouth.

Talion blushes, and he hopes that the dimness of the cave will hide it from the elf even though he knows he does not need to see him to know about his current predicament. 

Talion leans backwards, into the elf’s chest, and his back impacts against the stones of the cave, its cutting edges dulled by the moss that grows on them. But he still feels Celebrimbor, working on his back and his injured shoulder, and he thinks he can hear him hum with vague encouragement, somewhere deep inside his own mind, when Talion finally lets his body sag and rests his back against the wall.

The relief dulls Talion’s senses, and he’s distantly aware of the heaviness overtaking his limbs. He feels dazed, as if trapped in a dream, almost feverish, and he’s glad he’d shed his furs before this — whatever it is — began. 

“You turned down the affection the dwarf offered you,” a voice points out all of a sudden, and when Talion blinks his eyes open with some difficulty they’re met with the emptiness of the cave, only disturbed by the shadow his own sprawled body casts. 

It takes the ranger a second to understand Celebrimbor’s words, and he clears his throat in embarrassment when he does. 

“I did,” Talion says. 

“And yet you craved it.”

Talion finds it difficult to focus on his own words past the ringing in his ears.

“We have work to do, Celebrimbor,” the ranger says. “It was a bad idea to involve him in something like this.”

The elf appears at his side at the mention of his name as if he’d been summoned, startling Talion. His scarred, regal face regards the ranger, who sits up as best as best as he can despite the fact that his limbs don’t seem to respond to his commands.

The smith tilts his head and his eyes take on a look of profound consideration, and Talion feels torn apart and exposed from the inside out under the wise, ancient gaze of the spirit. He fights the urge to squirm and instead holds his gaze, gaping when the ghost of a smile appears on the corners of Celebrimbor’s lips.

“You are a fascinating creature,” he murmurs, and the rumble of his voice and the praise send a shiver down Talion’s spine that he cannot hold back. “I’ve known humans to be fickle, selfish creatures. They are driven entirely by the promise of immediate satisfaction and do not possess the need to see beyond it.”

The elf gets closer to him, closer to his face, and Talion nearly imagines he can feel the ghost of the spirit’s breath on his lips. 

“And yet you fight a war you gave everything for already without hesitation, and deny yourself comfort until your duty is fulfilled”, Celebrimbor says, and his grimace is sad and bitter and something else Talion cannot put a name to when he speaks again, his voice barely more than a murmur against Talion’s skin. “We could have been great allies in another time.”

The elf’s eyes fall towards Talion’s lips and the ranger’s head spins, and he barely hears his own words. 

“It appears you were mistaken.” 

The spirit hums wordlessly and the sound reverberates through Talion’s chest. “It appears so”. 

The brief silence that follows is charged with a sense of inevitability, and the faint dizziness of standing in the edge of a precipice and knowing you will soon meet the other side of it.

“Do you want this?” Celebrimbor asks then, and Talion doesn’t need to ask what he speaks of, not when he sees his own bewilderment and desperation and hunger reflected on the spirit’s eyes. 

“Yes”, he says, and it’s a soft and breathless, weightless, delighted plea that leaves his lips, but it feels as heavy as writing his destiny in stone.

“Close your eyes,” the elf asks, and Talion would protest, saying he wants to see him, when Celebrimbor vanishes from sight and he feels him, that both familiar and foreign presence, like a phantom limb, like the promise of a touch that does not come. 

He closes his eyes.

The fingers that hurriedly tug on the lacings of his battered and torn leather chest piece, barely deserving a title above “rag” where it once had proudly shown the sigil of the white tree of Gondor, are his. And so are the hands that roam over his own chest, hairy and broad and trembling now, circling his nipples and making every hair of his body stand up with anticipation. But it is not his touch. 

Talion’s hands are rough, thick and calloused, and the jagged scar on his palm from his first hunting mission over a decade ago as an eager recruit scratches his skin when he touches it. The hands that touch him now, however, are soft, almost delicate, methodical and cool against his heated skin.

“Magnificient,” the spirit murmurs as if to himself, and Talion feels stretched out, taking form in the hands of the smith, as if he was one of the elf’s unfinished masterworks that he tries to pry his final form from, submerged in the forge’s fire. 

“Celebrimbor-” Talion calls in a whisper. 

The reply of the elf reverberates inside his mind, inside his chest, against the caves of the wall, commanding and gentle at the same time, coaxing a broken sound out of him, charged with want and loneliness and something else, something overwhelming that aches and burns and grows inside his chest.

“Let me,” the spirit says, and Talion does. 

His hand closes around his own length nearly on its own accord. The familiar movements and the foreign sensation of the elf’s touch set alight the small portion of his mind that retained some sort of composure and he moans between his gritted teeth, digging his heels on the ground as his speed increases. 

The cave is deafeningly silent save for the waning creaking of the fire, the faint rustle of his clothing as his free hand clutches this discarded cape as it scrambles for purchase, and the labored breathing and choked off moans that are being wrenched free from the ranger’s mouth, that sound almost like sobs. 

It is not playful, or gentle. They don’t think to take their time, draw it out. It’s a desperate, losing race against the heat that builds inside of Talion inexorably, acute nearly to the point of pain. It seems almost unspeakable to feel like this, hollowed out with pleasure at the hands of another, in this blackened land where everything is metal and ash. 

Talion says the elf’s name over and over, like a chant, a plea, a lifeline. And Celebrimbor speaks only once, gently, in a whisper more naked than anything the human had heard from him before, and he thinks off-handedly then that he would like to remember that sound for as long as he’s doomed to walk this doomed land. 

“Talion,” he says, only once, spoken somewhere the ranger cannot reach.

It is what undoes him in the end, the sound of his name on the elf’s lips. Like an admission. An acknowledgement. A choice. 

He comes over his hand, his stomach, his shirt, gritting his teeth, letting his eyes roll back and his mind go still and silent with unutterable bliss for a single, precious moment. 

The grogginess after the almost violent strength of his pleasure is like heavy lead settling into his limbs and he welcomes it, only moving to clean himself off sloppily, and to throw his furs over his body in preparation for the freezing night.

He wants - _needs_ \- to say something, but the elf remains pointedly quiet, and he’s unable to come up with something more eloquent than “thank you”, which sounds rather useless and empty. 

“It had been a long time,” the elf says, and this time he’s visible, albeit looking away from him, hiding his features from him, and Talion’s chest aches strangely. 

Talion cannot tell whether he speaks about him or about himself, but he figures there is not much difference. He stills the hand that instinctively reaches out for him, yearning to place itself in the spirit’s hip, and he brings it to his own chest instead. 

“Yes,” he says, trying to imprint the naked and unguarded expression of the elf, now turned towards him, into his mind from between his drooping eyelids. 

The silence stretches on for a while, and Talion only realizes he’s closed his eyes when he opens them all of a sudden upon being startled by Celebrimbor’s voice. 

“Rest now,” he says, “we have work to do at dawn.”

The spirit looks down at him then, and something flickers in his face almost imperceptibly, as if light was filtering through a crack in a wall, but his features immediately rearrange themselves into their usual unaffected coldness, the unbreakable matter-of-factness that seems to cling to him at all times restored, and it is as much endearing as it is infuriating. 

“I will keep watch,” the elf adds.

“Thank you,” Talion murmurs to an already empty cave. 

The rhythmical tapping of the rain against the stones and the faint echoes of his body’s bliss lull him to sleep soon. His left hand clenches around the dagger he keeps tucked between his furs out of habit, but his dreams are undisturbed for the first time in what seemed like a lifetime, for the first time since he’d seen the sun settle on the wrong side of the Black Gate of Mordor.

Talion’s dreams are strange, formless, soundless, and his head hurts when he tries to remember them in the morning. But he thinks he recalls a silver presence, almost invisible, at the fringes of his conscience, watchful, ready, and he finds himself smiling. 

His voice moves wordlessly around a name in his sleep, reverently. He does not know it, but for the first time in a very long time, the name that he calls into the night like a whispered promise is not Ioreth’s. 

The echoes of the ancient name the ranger murmurs are lost to the darkness of Mordor, and the storm that rages on outside swallows it forever, but inside this cave, next to the human’s sleeping form, a faint shimmer of light flickers, made of silver and ethereal coldness, silently guarding the darkness as the dawn approaches at last.

**Author's Note:**

> I genuinely don't know what the audience for this even is, but I needed to get this off my chest. Also, adding gay legend Torvin was incredibly self indulgent but my world my rules I guess.
> 
> Endless thanks to whoever read until this point!


End file.
